Incipient Strangers

Yoshi Fujii

Delhi Photo Festival
New Delhi, India

Details

Title: Incipient Strangers
Creator: Yoshi Fujii
Date: 2015
Photographer's site: www.yoshikatsufujii.com
About the series: Siblings can be incipient strangers. Even siblings sharing the same blood can become distant and turn into strangers to each other as they each grow and forge their own paths in life. Sometimes, we fail to hit it off with friends and eventually lose touch. But with family, no matter how brittle the relationship, it cannot be severed. With family, we take liberties to say harsh words and give unwanted advice. With family, we have the sense that our actions will mostly be permitted and we end up creating an irreparable rift. Has this accretion of incidents caused my parents’ divorce? Since coming to see things that way, I decided to try looking at my family as strangers. That meant not standing on formality, but taking pains to consider the other party and work around their needs. If my family were total strangers to me, how would they react if I did such and such? I asked myself these questions and endeavoured to avoid unnecessary meddling. The process made me realise that everyone in a family has the same internal conflicts and faces each other with this set of contradictions. This struggle creates each person’s image of what that family is. It was through this process that I at last, began to see for the first time, something like the start of our family.
About the Photographer: After studying art film at Tokyo Zokei University of Arts, Yoshikatsu Fujii began photography work in 2008. He is based in Hiroshima and Tokyo. His project Red String, motivated by his parents’ divorce, was produced as a handmade photobook, and was nominated for several awards beginning with the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards. His next project, Incipient Strangers, expanded the subject of his photography from his parents to his extended family. A photobook of the same name, published in conjunction with an exhibition at Reminders Photography Stronghold in Tokyo, was also nominated for the Dummy Award Kassel.
#DPF2015: 2015

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